If you put content online, or organize content online, you already know them and make them. Who doesn’t!

On the web, personal publishing is one of the most popular things to happen in the last ten years.

Putting it bluntly, having an audience drives online activity just as much as does any other avenue of “sharing”.

Yes, the major emphasis on sharing tends to be on “social” or “crowd” activity where the key is the excitement of many-to-many relationships.

Publishing, on the other hand, relies on the excitement of a one-to-many relationship. In current lingo, to emphasize the “approval” of the many, it’s already been canonized as having “followers”.

WHO CARES

But gaining and holding on to followers makes approval something worth looking at more carefully. What are they really approving, and why?

In the vast openness of the web, a related distinction is between the followers you have versus the followers you want – which is actually another way of asking the question, why do you want followers, and why do they want you? Are you in synch? Does it matter? How?

It might be argued that the biggest breakthrough in publishing has really been the mechanisms that allow people to track you without making that effort themselves. This used to be called “subscription” but the liveliness of the web – its “always on” character – makes the sense of being connected more important now than the sense of being served.

This is a difference that is about far more than timing. The issue that content providers are coming back to is that being served makes being connected worthwhile.

CULTIVATING YOUR CONTENT

Service is experienced in terms of timeliness and quality, and that’s where cultivation comes in.

When content is created for an audience, it is not successful just because it is deliverable. It is successful because it has been developed to have a capability to express ideason contact. The content has been given the means to be effective on its own; however, the content provider has anticipated the circumstances of its contact with an audience.

People have put time into cultivating their content in a variety of ways. Anyone who has created a gallery, album, playlist or portfolio has already made numerous decisions based on how they want the content to have impact in the future.

Each decision reflects the provider’s intent with an audience. These distinctive decisions are not exclusive of each other. In fact, as shown here, each easier decision (at left) becomes a step towards the next more deliberate and sophisticated decision (at right). This is true whether the item is texts, images, sounds, or any blend.

Beyond storage and search, Most content tools that we use, whether older or newer, intend to help us get to a certain level of cultivation.

PLATFORMS

So how did we get this far without talking about blogs and ebooks`?

Any continued investigation of blogs will show that they are a fantastic opportunity for publishing online with multimedia tools, but as “a form” blogs actually span every one of the four types of content cultivation just mentioned. This shows that blogging – and likewise any book — is actually a “platform” for publishing.

In that same sense, eXie is a platform for publishing.

When a collection of online content is linked to an eXie frame, the frame makes the content arranged, cataloged and sharable in a form that supports the provider’s intent — ranging from a content gallery all the way through to a content portfolio. The typical use cases, each offering a kind of organization for value, are recognizable in many varieties. Just for example:

We already know that other available platforms work. But with eXie, the breakthrough is in the way that its frameworks let you handle content items and give them their best value for users.

Regardless of the use case or variant, eXie lets the content provider use the same organizational technique to create the publication.

arranging the content collection

managed distribution of the content

and supplying strong recognition of how the content is intended to be valuable.

Meanwhile, the publication user, who navigates the content collection, has the same ease of content access — confident and convenient — for all of the uses.

eXie is an online solution that is already available and in use across the many publishing variants. There is nothing to install, and it is automatically upgraded continually to offer increasingly simpler use with the flexible power of its design. With your eXie account, your publishing can go deeper or broader, whether casual or formal, with minimal complication or technical burden. Your eXie account also connects you to other eXie users in eXieCloud, the eXie online user community.

When there is content available, our interest in it is mainly based on whether it is relevant to our immediate need. Sure, we put things away for future reference. But that just anticipates arriving later at the point where the content needs to measure up.

Chances are very good that the first audience for that saved content will be ourselves. But that can quickly expand to other people, because our relationship with them may be why we kept something in the first place.

Naturally, whenever we expose the content again, we want to know whether the right people are in the audience. We casually say “audience” with a good degree of comfort. But it’s sometimes very painful to discover that the actual audience turns out to be different from what we meant.

To minimize that gap, understand the differences that can make things appropriate or inappropriate for the user’s intent. In the list of differences, all content is already finished content usable for future reference.

To start with, there are three different perspectives involved in deciding what should actually be accessible, and to what extent.

When a producer comes up with an item of content, the item is just one step along the path that finally puts it at the point of access given to a user.

The next step considers the rights of the content owner; and finally the provider looks at how closely matched the item’s presentable content needs to be to the requester’s need.

Overall, the path addresses the question of whether the item is supposed to be accessible in the way that it is exposed. The right answer to that question can be defined as a policy or set of rules, and the rules can be offered as a standard condition in effect when a request is made.

This is not a new idea for most content managers. But many requesters have no way of knowing what rules are in effect. The perception of what can be provided from a collection is worth managing by promoting an expectation, instead of allowing a disappointment.

The most consistent way to promote the desired expectation is to make it official as a type of catalog, or even more specifically, as a portfolio, of items having similar access. The portfolio advertises why the content will be accessible.

That still allows many different situations and users to make requests. However, in the portfolio, additional filtering of which items to expose or hold back can be defined for the individual items.

A typical additional filter is to define when and for how long the content will be accessible.

And a final control on access is to designate specific users with privileges. Designated users can be individuals or groups.

If most of the above sounds familiar, the reason may be that we already have a lot of experience being subscribers to content channels or publications. The benefit of the subscriptions and the channels is that we know what to expect in advance, which increases the confidence we have when we use them. The intended value of the content is closely aligned to the kind of access that is provided.